


THAE'S STORY

by neichan



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-02
Updated: 2005-11-02
Packaged: 2019-02-05 16:29:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12798198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neichan/pseuds/neichan
Summary: A Goblin/ffey prince tries to learn to live in the human world, during atime of escalating unrest. Strong Anita Blake flavor. Some disturbing imagery.





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Haven, the archivist: This story was originally archived at [Fandom Haven Story Archive (FHSA)](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_Haven_Story_Archive), was scheduled to shut down at the end of 2016. To preserve the archive, I began working with the OTW to transfer the stories to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2017. If you are this creator and the work hasn't transferred to your AO3 account, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Fandom Haven Story Archive collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/fhsa/profile).

I took my time walking down from the ground floor of the Catacombs enjoying how the moist, cool air felt on my skin. I was headed into the deeper levels, thirteen stories underground, where the oldest bones rested.

 

There were a total of twelve wide staircases spread out over the many acres of the compound, descending ever deeper, always down, until the last one, narrower, but still able to accommodate three humankind abreast, that went the final few feet to the lowest level, and to the most ancient bones.

 

When the Catacombs were first built by the ffey, before the burgeoning population of humankind took over this area, the bones from the above ground vaults nearby were moved here. At first just the bones of the ffey, but then bones from other peoples were added, a few goblins, trolls, substantially more demons, and lastly, the bones of humankind, humans, lycanthropes and the vampires.

 

Contrary to belief, Vampires don’t vanish in a puff of ash when they die. They do dry up faster than other corpses as they have a lower water content, so do the lycanthropes, but they both still leave bodies behind, and ultimately, bones. They also have souls, I swear it, and are no more likely to be evil than any human. Vampires have ghosts as well, just like every other once living creature.

 

Humans periodically call for the return of the bones of their ancestors. I love the potential for knowledge I can gain from the bones, but I also understand wanting to be close to one’s past history. I understand more than most, for I touch those bones, I touch the lives of the souls, I talk to them. Still, I try to tell those who ask me for my opinion, the bones don’t desire to be here or there. I speak to the spirits of the dead, they have no preference as to where they lie. Repatriation of bones is for the living peoples, not for the dead.

 

Discovering the tombs below ground was a chance for me to regain part of what I had lost when I left the ffey and Goblin courts. When I was there living in the courts, among my own people, I called the ghosts for them. I let the ghosts of the dead fill me, and through me, return to life for a time. I channeled them into this life. Made it possible for them to speak to the living, and for the living to speak to them.

 

I let the ghosts speak to the living who mourned them, to families of descendants who never knew them, to those who wished to know the history of the time the ghost lived in.

 

My own people rejected me, even as they used my services to talk to their ancestors, even as they saw my face become the face of their ancestors, they took steps to assure I would never have descendants of my own. That once I died, my own memory would fade and be gone, with none of my blood to call out for me, to want to see me raised.

 

The only ones who have not abandoned me in this place of mostly strangers are my bondmates. I have them here with me, Nuit and Bone. As they have been with me since my nineteenth year. They are pure, one hundred percent, noble Goblin blood. Kel-Goblins. Big, mean, powerful sons-of-bitches, if you pardon me the phrase. They are warriors, fighters. Among the most formidable in the world, rivaling the demons and lesser trolls.

 

They are sworn to me, are Nuit and Bone. Because, I am royal blood on both my Goblin father’s side and my ffey mother’s side. Though my mixed blood curses me, the law of both courts compelled me to be companioned and protected, and their presence is also to keep me occupied, controlled, watched and prevented from developing undesirable liaisons. By which is meant, they are supposed to keep me from fathering any children who would have to be, by definition, even more impure than I am. Watched, so I wouldn’t mix my blood with the blood of others in my desperation for children.

 

Though the curse has been laid upon me, the court nobles fear I might find a way to mate with a woman and have children of her. So wizards were called in and I was given a further curse, my seed is acid in the body of any female, it will scald her, perhaps kill her, wound her certainly.

 

I have sworn never to subject any woman to my flesh or seed, and the temptation of desire. My needs are not worth the life of any woman of any species. I will try to accept only males, and if I can not do that, then I will have none.

 

Goblin and ffey half-breeds find no encouragement in the courts to reproduce. It would have been a different story if I was half ffey and half demon, or half Goblin and half troll. The one intolerable combination was the one I was, ffey and Goblin.

 

Ffey and Goblin do not mix. The two courts have treaties, laws, and sworn oaths, all stipulating that Goblin will not breed with ffey, and ffey will not breed with Goblin.

 

The dictates are old, so old I have not found their year of origin, though I have asked the most ancient ghosts I raise. Always the answer is, that it is the way it has always been, the tenets handed down from the ghods themselves. And for those who break the oaths, there are the curses to bear, they will have no other children and no grandchildren, no future generations to remember them.

 

 

Alexander chose a day when I felt especially blue, discouraged by the rejection I regularly received from the humans I was ordered to meet and establish better diplomatic ties with.

 

Humans do not listen well to advice from other species, or indeed from one of their own kind, take it from me, most especially from ones who look as young as I. I wondered how the humans survived even their short lives, so arrogant and independent they are. So unwilling to be still, to listen to consider the wisdom of another’s experience. Youth and authority do not go hand in hand in any culture, I was both youthful and alien to them, not a winning combination.

 

On that day of my overriding depression, Alexander seemed to wander, lower and lower, going ever deeper and deeper into the earth, while he talked, while I moped, until I felt the tingling rush of ephemeral ghosts brushing past. Then I spared one incredulous look and an incandescent smile for the vampire master before my attention was given to other things. My melancholy vanished. I was surrounded by ghosts, by the spirits of the dead.

 

I let out a breathless, "Oh…." and then I had fairly sailed down the rest of the steps that day, Alexander at my heels, honestly surprised that I, a Historian, didn’t know about the vast cache of bones under my very feet, in the deepest reaches of the Catacombs. The largest cache in the parts of the world dominated by humans. It was of course fairly obvious considering the name of the place, the Catacombs, but I swear I had not put two and two together though I had lived at the Catacombs for a long enough time, I had wandered on my own not at all.

 

My skin was pulled tight over my flesh, dimpled with goosebumps, I laughed with the pure joy of the ghosts welcoming me into their kingdom, surrounding me, touching me inside and out, on my skin and within my mind. I could not stop myself from reaching back, and liberating my hair from it’s tightly bound and doubled braid, letting my charcoal/black hair flare out, picking up the electric touches of the ghosts, until I felt surrounded by the crackling energy of past life, of ancient histories, told and yet to be told, forgotten and waiting to be remembered.

 

Today Nuit and Bone wanted to come with me, but they did not like the ghosts around in such numbers. They did not like watching me change, become other that myself. Having them, my Kel, nearer, using them as an anchor made raising the ghosts and speaking to them easier, but I could do it without.

 

Sensitive enough to feel the spirits, but not enhanced enough to talk with them, it was often disconcerting for my Kels to be down here. Hard for them not to react to the touches they felt from the stronger spirits, ghosts they could not see. I’d seen how their marbled skins twitched and rippled under the unseen assault of so many gliding, whispering touches brushing over their bodies. So, I usually came down alone, despite the Kel’s instincts to be with me, protect me, or to at least have me in sight at all times. They protested each time, without fail, but I, more often than not, won our discussions/arguments, and was permitted to come down unaccompanied.

 

I rarely had time now to spend in the basement catacombs, communing with the bones and the ghosts of the dead, this day was a rare treat and I wanted to enjoy it, to savor every moment. Each step was a step closer to the connection, the chance to relive history through the memories of the ghosts of the piled bones, to hear their wisdom and foolishness, their joys and agonies. Sound echoed down here, almost musically, as if the walls held their breath, waiting for a chance to be heard, to sing. It was how I viewed the bones. Each set had a tale to tell, if only they had someone to listen, to hear them sing, they waited for me, waited to tell me their tales.

 

Humans, the ones who lived all around this valuable cache, had no system in place to catalog and record the stories the ghosts wanted to tell. I was astounded at this oversight, and I made it my task to find a human to record the words for the sake of the words and the ghosts and most especially for the living.

 

No one had been down here in over a hundred years, well, not exactly true, but no one who had the ability to record the memories, the History. People, humans and humankind had come down these stairs, but fled back up when they found nothing of monetary value in the vaults, only bones, and dried remains. Humankind fear the dead, they fear ghosts. They fear what they cannot understand and what they cannot control.

 

There were vaults just like these at the court of the ffey where I had grown up. But I had not been there for more than ten years. I missed the familiar bones, the stacks I had walked between for all my life, until I had been ordered out away from the courts to serve my ffey king, to serve his justice.

 

Being of royal blood I always knew the day would come when I was called. But not so soon, I had hoped to have a hundred years in the vaults, I had not even had a fraction of that. And I had also covertly hoped I would be overlooked as impure and cursed as I was.

 

It did not happen, I was called, and now here I was. These bones piled all around me, weren’t familiar yet, they didn’t call to me like old familiar friends, not yet. But I wanted to touch them to bring them back to life for a time, to hear all they had to say. I wanted to know them by touch, for each to be a familiar friend under my questing fingers. I longed to look up and in, and be them, each one, to become someone else, to remember a life I had not led as if it was my own.

 

There was a little light, I brought no candle, no flashlight. In wide braziers, small, smokeless fires burned, magical fires, kindled and set in place a few millennia ago, when the place had been completed, fires that would never burn out, or pose a threat, or consume anything, not even the precious oxygen way down here. My ffey/goblin genes let me see as clearly as if daylight streamed in to these deep places. I was a water-blood, tainted, unfit. I had the gifts of both parents to some degree. Both cursed and blessed it seems.

 

There are many kinds of ffey, wood, forest, earth, water, air, stone, mountain, river, ocean and other, rarer kinds of elves. I was an earth elf on my mother’s side. I loved the deep places of the world, like this place, where the soil called to me, telling me of it’s cool promise of life, it’s richness, it’s cradle of life. My Goblin ancestors preferred to live in cool caverns underground, or in stone buildings, wide and cool with earthen floors to cushion our feet, and connect us with our Mother.

 

My ffey ancestors were those who tended the soil, it’s plants and trees under all phases of the moon, new to full and back to new, light to dark. I saw very well in pitch blackness. The low lighting here posed no problem for my eyes. The tang of rich, secret-laden earth welcomed me and gladdened my heart.

 

Finally, I reached the lowest level, the place with the oldest bones in wide elaborate boxes grown delicate and fragile with age, with names scratched into their scarred tops. My shoes sank into the soft earth, and I kicked my shoes off, so I could stand in the cool loam with my bare feet, curl my toes into the dirt. It felt so good I had sunk in to it up to my calves before I realized what was happening. I fought with warring desires; to throw off my clothes, sink fully into the earth and glory in it’s embrace, or to reach out to the bones and have a long afternoon talking to the people, the ghosts I had been longing to meet.


	2. Part 2

*Take power where and when it is offered to you. Don’t question too hard what you will pay for it. There will always come a time when you need power, and sometimes you have just enough, not a drop left over. Having power can mean saving those you love. So, take it when you find it. Never squander the opportunity to secure power. Never forget there is more for you to learn, more that you need than you can ever have.*

 

I sighed as I remembered that little speech. I’ve paraphrased it for sure, but the important parts are all there. It holds true for me, for what I am, a perversion of Goblin and ffey blood, without ally. For other people perhaps it does not.

 

But I, oh yes, I need all the power I can find. I’ve met very holy beings who have all they need, and seek nothing else, true demi ghods. I have never met a full ghod, from what I have heard, they are more human, needing, always needing, demanding. They are as they should be.

 

I’ve met the mentally handicapped, humans and trolls who never leave their burrows, also whole and complete as they should be, content. But, I am never going to be that way. No safe burrow for me to hide in, no haven, there are too many who wish I had never been. I will be struggling for every year of life I live.

 

I have the body form of a ffey, mostly, slender and sleek, fined boned, graceful, only five and a half feet tall, about average for a ffey, though I do carry more muscle than any other ffey I have met, it is easily concealed under my robes.

 

My coloring is all Goblin, if less vivid than most Goblins, my base skin tone amber, with threads of darker brown and lighter ivory and shiny copper marbling the amber.

 

My fangs and claws are considered delicate by Goblin standards, more decorative than useful, and while some few ffey have fangs, none have claws. My hair is Goblin black, straight and thick, slippery/slick, very heavy, like a fall of silken water to my knees, streaks of charcoal grey run through it, not the streaks of age.

 

I kept my hair tied back in a youth’s braided club, because by Goblin and ffey standards I am a child still, I have not mated with a woman, I have not fathered a child. I could age and die without ever earning the right to cut my hair and thus be recognized as an adult. My own people will not grant me the right to have children.

 

My eyes are the same amber as my skin, but glowing and clear, with depths that seemed to fall away as one looks into them. They are called ‘Historian’s Eyes’, and they let me see the ghosts, they are my window to the world of the dead. For that reason alone I think them my best feature, seeing/being the ghosts is what I most love about my life.

 

Otherwise, by the standards of both ffey and Goblin, I am painfully plain. I do not glow as the ffey do, I have no skin of silken texture, skin soft beyond the comprehension of man, and nor am I a single, pure color, my eyes are not the well admired blue or green.

 

I have not the ethereal beauty of the ffey, nor the massive muscle and virility of the Goblins, the sheer physical presence that made it nearly impossible not to stare at an attractive Goblin, covered in perfect muscle and gifted with exquisitely marbled skin. A true force of nature glorified and so primitive, primal, one of the wellsprings of life.

 

My two Kel are among the most sought after for their masculine beauty and power. Both had fathered children before coming to Companion me. Nuit is four hundred and thirty years old, Bone six hundred and twelve. I am far, far younger yet they are companion to me, and someone planned that carefully, to insult them, a biting punishment.

 

Bone is six and a half feet tall, the epitome of virile, Goblin maleness, acres of full, fat free muscle, ivory based skin tone with gold and glowing white marbling, and fangs as well as fearsome retractable claws. His tail is as long as I am tall, a lethal weapon he wields with great skill.

 

Nuit is even taller by a few inches, just less than seven feet tall. Broader, stronger, blue-black, with the thinnest marbling stripes of platinum and charcoal. His eyes are black-crimson pools, his fangs the starkest white, and long, his claws sliver, hooked, his tail shorter than Bone’s, but thicker, more powerful. A match to his denser musculature.

 

Bone’s eyes are a grey so true, so warm and yet cool, like steam and mist, clouds, deep water and rain, that I marvel nature can create such a perfect color at all.

 

Both of them have horns, Bone’s are the color of his skin, ivory, and curved out sideways first then forward. Nuit, though has the most rare of horns, double horns, side and rear horns curving to sharp forward facing points of deepest black.

 

Nuit also has dew claws, deadly rapier sized retractable claws halfway up his inner forearms. He is the only Goblin I have seen who has them. They are a mark of great desirability among us Goblins, and oh so rare. Some say that to feel dew claws being drawn along one’s flanks is the most erotic touch imaginable. The promise/threat of them piercing into tender, ready flesh….beyond compare.

 

I don't know. I have not felt them used thus. Not yet.


	3. Part 3

There is too much behind me, my family line stretches for generations, into the long millennia of time past. It is the only history I do not explore. The ghosts of my line, ones I have never spoken to.

 

My ffey family is the ruling family of the high court of the ffey in what is now called America. My Goblin family is the ruling one of the Goblin peoples throughout the world.

 

Before this place was called America by the humans, it was called the Farland by the ffey. The Goblins called it, still call it, Dinea, after the large lizards who lived here so long ago. It is easier for me to call it America, because I am out here among the humans, and have been for a long time. I am used to their words now, for it is to them I must speak day in and day out.

 

I am Thae, cousin to the king of ffey, my home was the Earthmound of the region called the Southeast. But, now I am not home, I am in the far territory west, the last territory before the great, cold ocean, the territory defined by some as belonging to the master vampire, Alexander.

 

My cousin, not the cousin-king, Finn, is also out living among the humans and the human stock, the lycanthropes and the vampires, but he, at times returns to Faery, while I do not, not for the last decade. Faery is forbidden to me until I am called for, until they wish for me to return. I am beginning to understand that will never happen.

 

The world is becoming an ever more dangerous place. The old races, the Goblins and the trolls have been roused to anger, difficult as that is, and they are debating the fate of the humans on earth. The ffey are caught between the old races and the new.

 

I miss my cousin Finn and wish he might join me, the ffey-king has told me he may send him, to add his influence to mine, his protection to mine. I am to do what I must to keep control over the territory, including the human states of Arizona, southern California and Nevada, if and when the old races decide to begin a true war here. I will be in the middle of it all, at the order of the ffey king.

 

I only ever wished to be a Historian, to search the archives of books and the memory of the dead, of bones, to know, to relive and record the past for my people, and other peoples. I do not want to be a soldier, a politician, or a diplomat. I do not want to be the avenging arm of the ffey king, or any other king.

 

The ffey can not stand against the Goblins and the trolls if they unite, but the ffey do have some influence in both courts. The humans are another factor all together. The humans don’t usually listen to reason, they are independent and too proud, short lived and therefore given to be rash, not seeing far into the future, more concerned with the now. Negotiation with the Goblins can take decades to finish, and with the trolls that time frame is often closer to a century. Or the Goblins can move with lightning quickness into conflict and war. The trolls are slower, but the advance of the trolls has a crushing inevitability about it that is overwhelming.

 

I don’t know what will happen if war is declared. Well, I do know part of it, but I don’t know the final outcome, who will be victorious, and how severe the losses to the world may be.

 

Blood will flow in rivers, that is about the only guarantee. Many, far too many, will die. And in the end, the Goblins will survive, at least some of them, the trolls will continue, the ffey and the demi-ffey, probably will go on, and the demons, but the younger races, they will be no more. Vanished. That is my prophecy, the sad vision I see. The loss of human, probably vampire and lycanthrope.

 

Truth be told, I harbor no great love for the humans, nor great animosity, either. I admit I find many of them frustrating, and if I had a choice would not seek them out. But my ffey cousin-king has told me he wants me to protect them, and the two races that sprang from them.

 

I have met lycanthropes and vampires, they have enough power, some of them, to be invited to reside at the ffey courts as honored guests. Some are even more powerful than the weaker ffey. A few do live amongst the ffey at court, though no humans will ever live there. The humans are the descendants of the ffey, but they are not respectful and obedient children, much the opposite! They rail at the loss of long life, blaming the ffey for not granting it to them, though it was a mere quirk of genes, of nature that resulted in their brevity of life.

 

A decade has passed since I left the courts. My leaving had been voluntary, sort of, at least I had not refused when Jenus my cousin-king told me I had to go out into the world. This was the first time I had left the courts at the king’s order, the first time I had left at all since being grudgingly granted my office as Historian. My leaving left the courts without any Historian, angering the ghosts.

 

But ghosts are dead, and none of the nobles wanted to listen to the ghosts speaking on my behalf, ghosts who’s words had to come from my mouth. I was not believed. I was ordered to go. The king had forbidden me to ease my loneliness and bring my cousin and childhood friend Finn out on the mission I was sent to accomplish. Jenus sent no one with me, later my Goblin cousin-king sent me two strangers. Nuit and Bone they were named.

 

My cousin the king of the Goblins sent me no diplomatic orders as of yet, but he sent to me Nuit and Bone, complete with rings of bonding I was not allowed to refuse. The decree of bonding was ironclad, accomplished in absentia by the full Goblin Council of Nobles. A fact, one I couldn’t fight or refuse, done before I knew about it.

 

The two Kel-goblin pressed their rings around my wrists, and I pressed the ones sent to me around theirs. And it was done, recorded, witnessed, unbreakable excepting the death of us all.

 

I watched as the tingling vividian bands sank into my flesh, the living metal becoming one with my body. It burned, itched. I was theirs, they were mine. And it was a bitterly forged joining, a bonding forced on all of us, not one taken up in joy.

 

They had done well enough for me, but it was hard on all of us to forget none of us had chosen, we had all been ordered, compelled. I knew somehow my cousin-king had used coercion to get them to come to me, and I knew it had taken years for the hatred and anger to leave their accusing eyes when they looked on me. I saw them blaming me with their gaze every time they looked on me for the first years of our association, then it faded until I could not see it, whether or not it was still there, I did not know for sure. I was not so foolish as to think the disgust was not there still, hidden where I could not see it, but there none the less.

 

Both cousin-kings forbade me to couple with females of any species, and cursed my body so I could not go back on my word of obedience. Humiliating me in front of their courtiers, full formal witnesses for the decrees of both bonding and celibacy in absentia. I was forbidden to become adult, for one was only adult when one had children to pass on one’s blood. I was compelled to be forever childless. The sorceress laid her hand on me when I gave my word, and laid the curse on me. I was no stranger to curses, but this one was painful to me, tearing deep into my flesh, and deeper into my soul.

 

Without children I had only the blessings I had from birth, I was a prince of the ffey and the Goblin, I was a Historian. But, I was prevented from claiming my families’ lands, I could not inherit, I could not sit in either court, I could not rule. I was twenty nine, and yet a child, though capable of being called an adult by the ffey for the last four years. Majority came at twenty five among the ffey, and at thirty among the Goblins. Next year I would be thirty and once again I would receive a missive from a cousin-king and his noble court reminding me I was not an adult, though I was of age.

 

Next year, on my majority, I would be expected to take Nuit and Bone to my bed, and not in the way they were already in it, not merely to sleep. They would have the permission of the Goblin court to bed me then, to claim my reluctant body. They would go into heat. I would respond if I was Goblin enough to do so. Only six more months. If we did not bed each other ‘voluntarily’, an order would be sent, and witnesses would arrive to see the act done under duress, with my consent or without. I did not want to be held down, to have unwilling lovers forced on me. I had the desire for children, but I had not yet had the desire for sex.

 

By bonding to me, Nuit and Bone had been forced to celibacy for the years until my Goblin coming of age. I am sure they thanked me for that. We had not spoken of it. Nor had we yet broached the subject of my deflowering scheduled for roughly half a year from now.

 

My impure blood had kept me from the usual youthful innocent experimentation young ffey and Goblins engaged in with age-mates. I never had a lover of either sex. I was virgin in the most complete sense of the word. I would never have the right to cut my hair short like Nuit’s black curls that framed his pointed ears, or Bone’s golden ones.

 

I had heard rumor that Finn was coming. I prayed the whispers be right for once, and that he would stay with me until my time had passed. I was happy to be waiting to see him if the rumors of his coming were true. I felt a rising of joy, like bubbles of champagne in my blood, sunlight in my heart. I was having trouble keeping the grin off my face.

 

Finn and I had grown up together, he was only eight years older than I was, my closest relative, and growing up, my confidante and friend.

 

And I needed him in all those roles.


End file.
